As I am writing this, the news about the imminent disbanding of November 17, the last active European terrorist organisation are all over the press and the TV. Everybody is saying a lot of things that make very little sense, but what seems to be confirmed, is this: a guy, Savvas Xeros, whom nobody from the police or the secret services seems to have ever known anything about, was carrying a bomb on him, which blew up in his face, by mistake, of course. He's being held at the hospital, yes, he is being held there, they were keeping him under sedation, and out of the reach of his lawyer and his familly, for two full weeks now, and during that time, the police allegedly discovered two hideouts containing the groups' arsenal. The cops say they got there following information given by members of the group who wish to collaborate with the fucking authorities in order to benefit from a law which is brand new in Greece, and allows criminals who testify against their partners to escape punishment, just like we see in all those Hollywood gangster movies. There's more to all of this, of course, than meets the eye.
17 November was active in Greece, since 1975. That makes 27 years, during which no member of the group was ever caught alive, and the ones killed in forays with the police have yet to be convincingly proved as actual members of the organisation. That, amidst numerous bombing attacks and shootings of people. The actual number is 101. Everybody here is going on endlessly about how it is strange that a member of such a thorough organisation managed to make such a stupid mistake - having the bomb blow up in his face is not the least part of it, apparently a revolver that the police know as a trademark of the group was found along with some grenades a few steps away from Xeros, and he had like 60 keys on him, two of them openning the doors of the appartments where the group stashed their weapons. Ok, so I 'm not a terrorist, and I 've no idea what it makes sense to carry with you at a terrorist strike, and what does not. And if I was to take into account all the bullshit on TV panels these days, I 'd grow even more ignorant than I usually am.
But you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how suggesting it is that all this happens suddendly in a time where there are almost every day emanations of hysteria from that little white house overseas. "The War Against Terror" seems to spurn a new scenario of how "Theee eeeeeevil onezzz" will strike at the heart of Democracy, every fucking day. Now, they 're coming with anthrax-by -mail. Now they 're coming with sea speeders. Now they 're coming via the internet. Now they 're coming from the center of the earth. And the brutes that make the US a great nation, of course they believe all this bullshit, because their personal security comes, or should come, first, before their personal freedom. But of course, cattle do tend to think so, that's why they 're penned up so easily. And never forget that whoever is not a friend of the Big White Father, is his enemy. Haw. The US Empire now has some fucking believable excuse to stick its' nose wherever it pleases... well, believable as far as the morons who vote in the US are concerned, that is. But then, they 're the ones who matter, because they are the public opinion there. The public opinion in the rest of the world doesn't really make any difference. Nukes talk, people walk, right? Not that it's just the big bully who benefits from the shit against terror. My beautiful country, for example, is all worked to an inch of orgasm, because we finally got the 2004 Olympic games (they 're going to be a fucking disaster, don't come, you 've been warned and you 're a sucker if you pay for that shit anyway). Definitely, you can now see my point. November 17 is a bad bad thing for international security, tourism and the image of Greece abroad. So it had to be put down, and, guess what, everyone seems to believe it is just being put down as I write these. It's not a mystery. Not at all. It should 've like been expected, and I can't see what manner of a moron Xeros was to go plant his stupid bombs in the middle of all this shit. Obviously, the man is a simpleton, that's why he paid for the rest of the bastards who are now said to be backstabing each other. Not that they needed to. Oh, did I forget to mention it? Everybody knows November 17 is known to the authorities. Some authorities at least. It's speculated that some secret services actually collaborate with them, and since they let them hit on targets that usually have to do with american interests in Greece, I can but applause them. But it's rather obvious the whole thing was becoming quite uncomfortable, a fucking hot potato, for homever it was the group had ties with from within the stupid authorities.
Definitely though, it's not the cops that scored a success against N17. One more thing everybody knows here, in Greece (not that it stops Citizens from collaborating with them, heavens, no). Cops are only good for scaring off youth with molotov coctails, and trafficking drugs.
Oh, do mark me down as picturesque, by all means. But I have my reasons to dislike them, and when it comes to explaining my total mistrust of their "methodology", I have a very personnal experience to draw my venom from.
In January 1990, a week before the xmas/new years eve vacations, I left school, and started looking for a job, because I really meant to leave home. I wanted to find me some money, to go live by myself, away from my boring and depressing excuse for a family. At first I only found a job distributing flyers for an english school, and of course it wasn't enough. Later on, I found a better job. A friend of my aunt, had a patisserie, and he needed a helping hand, so I worked there. The money was not bad, the job was good, although it tended to get on the tiring side, and I could eat all the cheese pies, and spinach pies, and creme pies and brioshes I wanted, I made them after all. It started to look better, and then the housing problem got solved too. I had met a couple of punkster girls in a party at some friends house, and they told me they were planning to squat in an abandoned building. They hadn't found the right place yet, but they were quite serious about it. They even had the banner ready. No, I 'm kidding, they didn't. But they told me they were gonna do it, and if I wanted, I could go with them. Guess what. So I did. We found a nice little old house in Harilaou Trikoupi street, no 170, and we broke the chain holding the doors together one nice night, got in and started cleaning the place with the help of people from other squats the next day. There was a healthy squat movement in Athens and Salonika at the time, as well as a fairly active anarchist one too, so we had good help.
We cleanead tonns of pigeonshit and dead rats' carcasses from the ground floor and the second floor, but the basement was left to the Confederate Forces of the Rat and Roaches Nations. Fair is fair. We drew an electrical line, broke the seal of the water clock in front of the house, and we were able to call the place home. I was swimming in an ocean of bliss. Ok, so there were seven of us to begin with, the two informed us their folks didn't let them do it, and three more, the two girls I had met initially and another that had come later, spent the first day (and night, and most of the nights after that) in their moms' homes, but I and the other guy left alone in the house to keep it were more than enough. Who ever cared, anyway. We saw very few cops the first few weeks, and none at all after it.
Well, at least the others didn't see any.
All the time I stayed there, I was getting up early in the morning to start the long hard journey to Piraeus, where the job was. One day, just as I had come out of the house, the police was there. They were in civilian mode, and they were from the minors' department, cause I was a minor then, but one of them did show me a gun to scare me. Ha ha. Right. They took me to the centrals of the police force, were the minors' office was, they called my mom and dad, and the minors' DA, but they couldn't keep me. My time there was interesting though. I had some fun screaming at them, about my ideals back then- mixing god, freedom, democracy and the constitution in angry rants, and I do think they were really impressed. I allways had my way with words, you know. Anyway, in the end they couldn't keep me, cause I hadn't really done anything illegal, just skipped home, so I went back to the House.
That was the fun part.
The unfunny part came about a couple months later, when the other police, not the minors' department, but the street cops from the local station got their greasy palms on my shoulders. It's a long story. Grab a beer, light a fag, sit back an enjoy the ridicule.
In the last days of March 1991, a couple of months after the squat begun, I had a crash on a girl from the house. I can't even recall her name, today, but back then it must have been really important, because when she said we were over (and we hadn't even fucked yet), I drank a bottle of cheap sweet whine (mavrodafni) in a few gulps, listening to Blood Fire Death (Bathory) and got in a fight with one of the house walls. It won, and I broke a bone, the one behind the right hands' pinkie. A couple of weeks later, I realised the pain wasn't going away, and went to see a doctor. He put the hand in a cast, and I hang it around my neck in a sling.
Now, let me give you a description of myself back in those days, who, yes, they were the days. Ha. I was 17, you see. I had this thick tangled mass of curly fair hair on my head, it was long and bushy, and it fell all the way over my shoulders to my back, and also hang in front of my eyes. I used to paint my eyes black, but they didn't show under the hair anyway. I wore the usual Greek metallhead outfit: tight jeans, cut and torn shirts, several layers of them, a fake-leather jacket, and army boots. Being a metalhead at a time when bands like Bathory, Venom, Sodom, Kreator and Destruction (revel in the semantics of the metal movement of the days, European Thrash was emerging in glory, and there was much rejoicing and general ga ga when the last three bands came to Greece for gigs) I had this thing for studded leather wristbands, which I wore oblivious to their resemblance to the standard gay-pride gear. My machine-gun bullet belt was my fetish though, and I seldom left home without it. Put all this together with my hand hanging from my neck in a fresh piece of cast, add the general turmoil going on in Athens those days, due to the abovementioned anarchist movement having fun with the cops, and you 'll see I wasn't exactly inconspicuous looking like that. I don't think I 've ever been stared at more than that time, until I first climbed in my high heeled shoes and put on my wig to go out into the night like the tranny I became later.
Looking like this then, it was that I set out, one beautiful spring day to buy a string for my guitar. No, the cast didn't really hamper my playing. Go figure. I was walking solemnly down Harilaou Trikoupi street, thinking my usual thoughts (bzzzzzztwiiittzzzzzwiiitzzzzzbzzzzbzzzbzzzzpeowbzzzzztt) when I realised I was going to pass in front of the police bus stationed outside the offices of PASOK, the party of the government. The thing was parked there, because, as I said, these were difficult times. And I had seen several cop patrols hanging around the area, watchdogging around, on general principles. It suddendly dawned on me that perhaps I shouldn't pass in front of the place looking as I did, cause these pigs are always so unfathomable in their intentions. Normally, they would just look at me in their usual ugly ways, and maybe emit some idiotic catcall, but then, you never knew, back then.
So I turned left to the first byway.
Then I heard a voice, calling for me to stop.
I turned around, and saw someone who looked too ugly to be anything but a cop. He came up to me, and asked me for identification. I showed him, without asking him for his. He said he was with the police, and asked me what I was doing there, stuff like that, I can't remember exactly, but he was being generally rude, and quite archetypically cop-like, so it didn't even cross my mind for a second that he could not be a real cop. Well, he wasn't but he took me to the police station anyway. Once there, the truth came out, that he wasn't a cop, he had some relative who was one, but he himself was not.
Of course, I got mad at that. I said I was going to sue everyone in sight, and that must have had some success as a threat, because the next thing I know, I was in the stations' basement, in a cell all my own. They let me call my cousin, who is a lawyer, and a leftist, but he didn't want to get his hands dirty and he mumbled some apologies. My dad is a lawyer too, but I wasn't calling him! So I stayed there, in the cell for several hours, until they took me upstairs, in the offices.
They took my statement for what happened, and then they took me to the precincts' commander. He told me to sit down, and was generally friendly and pleasant, just like my headmaster at school a minute before erupting in a fit of accusations about my ethical integrity and my classroom behavioral patterns.
The commander didn't blow up though. With a very cool tone of voice, he announced:
"You were in the squatting of the Polytechic school".
There had been one recently, that had lasted a couple of months. It had started, as usual, in the 17th of November. This is not a coincidence. The 17th of November 1973 is the date of a students' revolt against the Junta. It started in the polytechnic school. The revolt is commemorated every year, and for a while the custom called for anarchist groups to enter in fights with the cops around the polytechic shool, brake and burn everything they could, and then take refuge in the schools' asylum when the cops came a -knocking. Things had started getting really serious in 1985, when a "stray" bullet from a pigs' gun hit a kid in the back of the head and killed him. The year I was arrested, the squatt had lasted a lot longer than usual, and amongst the highlights of that time, was the taking away of two computers from the schools' area. Not that they could have been anything but utter junk, those computers, but the news treated their removal as an indignant atrocity, to be punished by acid fire rainning down from the heavens on the sadistic beasts guilty of it.
I had been there of course, and since I was fairly convinced cops in civilian outfits had been all around the place during the squat of the school, I figured it wasn't impossible for them to have seen me and recognised me. I was a squatter, after all. It was less than a month since I had been taken to see the minors' department cops. I must have had a record, somewhere. So, I thought I 'd play safe, and not deny it.
"Yes", I said, "I was there a couple of times".
"But we know you were one of the organisers of the whole thing" the commander replied. "Don't deny it. We have you on photo."
Ouch.
Fucking micro-tech, I thought to myself. I tried to remember when I could have been photographed during the squat, but I couldn't. It must have been some ultra-high-tech-micro-fucking-concealable piece of camera there. It wasn't a safe thing to carry a full size camera in events like that, even if you had a thiry feet mohawk crest on your head. Pics were like, fucking forbidden, you know? Something cops did, in such events. And it seemed like they had done it this time.
"What picture?" I blurted.
"This picture".
The commander reached under his desk, and produced a piece of paper the size of a poster.
I didn't get it at first.
It was a poster.
I had seen it before. It was a New Democracy poster. It had a photograph of a guy with a scarf over half of his face, and a black flag in one hand, sitting on top of the polytechic schools' walls. It said "PASOK suggests: If you want to get into the university, go squat it".
I looked at the poster, then back at the commander. I must have looked really bewildered at the time. See, I knew cops were pigs. I was only about to find out that they actually are mental retards.
"It's you" the commander said. "You 're the one in the picture. Don't deny it now".
I said something like "You gotta be fucking joking". I couldn't believe it. I mean, OK I was only 17, and I knew nothing about cops, how they operated, what exactly it is that they do, and stuff like that. I had, as you can understand, a comic-book concept of cops. I thought they were evil, not stupid, you know? The guy on the poster, for the record, he did look like me, in the same way all the kids in the area, Exarhia, an area notorious then for its' "anarchists" looked the same. He wore a fake leather jacket, army boots, jeans, and had long hair a bit like mine. So what could I say? I said what I told you I said, I said "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
He wasn't.
Or maybe he was. I bet he was having fun with all this. Not that it would keep being fun, especially for me, whom it wasn't looking fun to anyway, if I did anything stupid, like "confess" I was the head of the parade that had tramped its' way into the school, like mr commander expected me to. How the fuck could he expect me to do it, I don't know, but he insisted I was the one on the poster. He went on with the shit too.
"We know it's you who organised the whole thing, and you who stole the computers from the school". He explained.
I said, "You have to be fucking kidding me, no?"
No, I didn't know what else to say.
The commander repeated they knew it was me, and that they were going to press charges for all that, and then sent for some other cop to take me to an office next door. This one was bigger than the other, and there were more cops in it. They ordered me to empty my pokets on one of the tables. I had a letter from a stupid shrink my mother was seeing, who had seen me, mom, and my stepfather for some shitty marriage counseling my mom needed. She had written several things about my "psychological profile" on a piece of paper my mother had given me to read, because my mother is a big sucker when it comes to things like that, and I had kept it in my pokets because I never throw stuff away. I also had some flyers with A's on them, and anarchistic content, that I had picked up I don't know where anymore. There were lots of other stuff in my pockets, and the cops started taunting me about every little bit of it, until they got to the shrienks' paper, and the leaflets. They got really vicious then. I can't remember what they were saying, but it must have been pretty effective, because I started feeling my eyes warm up, and then start to itch, and then go all wet with tears, and I was crying with sobs, the big sissy. But I was crying with anger. I started screaming to them to leave me alone. Up to then, half the cops that had come in the room I was, had asked me if I was OK, if I wanted something, an orange juice or coffee, and the other half had called me names (mostly taken from human anatomy books, like, cunt, dick, ass, etc), and threatened me. You know the deal. Good cop, bad cop, but lots of them. I screamed at them to stop playing this stupid theatrical piece with me, stop being good half of them, the rest bad, and either all ask me if I needed orange juice, or all make me swallow it with the bottle.
They stopped taunting me and looked at each other with little nervous smiles like kids caught conspiring. I couldn't believe it. After that they left me on my own for a while. All this time, I saw people peering in momentarily from the door, glancing my way and retreating fast. I assumed they must have been cops too. Later it turned out they weren't. Bare with me.
My period of peace lasted only a little, until the people who put their heads in the room and looked at me had stopped doing this annoying thing, and I was left alone with the best good cop, who was sitting in a chair next to me. Then the cops started coming in the room again, one by one, it seemed like the whole fucking station was coming in to take their turn picking on me. They kept calling me in medical terms (eh, more or less medical ones), and they had now started telling each other "is he the one?" and "yeah, that's him" and "he's been identified". I wasn't really responding though, so a little short anal-retentive guy came in, and threw a tantrum. He told me he was going to let me go, but wherever I went, he 'd find me and get me back whenever he wanted. He stomped on my bebooted foot, with his heel, with a mad expression on his face. My boots had iron lining on the inside, and he stomped his heel right on it, but I figured if I told him, he was prone to have me take them of, wear them and stomp my feet with them, so I played my part and screamed with agony, until his instincts were satisfied and he left me alone. Then, a big fat baby-faced bastard of a cop came in, and one of his friends asked him the days' conundrum:
"Is he the one, partner?"
"Yes", baby face confirmed. "He's the one who burned our colleague. We have identified him".
Ah, I was seeing now. The news about a policeman who had been assaulted with molotov bombs had been in the papers the week before. He was in a patrol car with another cop, and he didn't get away in time, like the other managed to. He had been burned badly and was still at the hospital. Now, they wanted me to believe I had been identified as the attacker. Well, there were several ones, you understand, one person would have to be Vishnous' avatar to manage throwing a volley of molotov bottles on a patrol car on his own. But, I was the attacker. No matter my hand was in a sling at the time (and still, that day at the station). Baby face scoffed knowingly and left the room, nodding at some papers he was holding. These guys should have been nominated for an academy award, I 'm telling you.
The show went on for a while, until we all reached the limits of our acting resources, and then some guy I had never seen before came in the room. Later, he turned out to be the co-driver of the guy who had been burned. I didn't know it then of course, and since he knew I didn't know, he started patronising me, the little cunt. He started asking me why I dressed like that, like a street punk (take a wild guess), and why I had long hair, and why I was such a bad bad little boy. He told me when he was my age he had also been a wild youth, he had sideburns and listened to rock and roll, and wore bell-bottoms, can you believe it? But growing up he chilled out and now he was a respectable citizen, see? He even had the audacity to put his arm around my shoulders and tell me he was my friend, or something equally preposterous. He was half the reason I was going to be taken to court, the fucking vermin, and he had the crass to play like this with me. Fucker!
Later, I was taken back to my cell in the basement, and left there waiting until 12 o'clock. That's the time when they change shifts, you see. Supposedly the new shift didn't want to have anything to do with my case, and I don't blame them.
I was taken to the officers' -on- duty office, and there I saw my father. I hadn't seen him for a while, because after I skipped school and left home we hadn't had lots of contact, and even before that we had had a series of rows culminating in him punching me in the face one night at my moms' house. He was wearing a deep but bright blue suit, that was really not him, but this wasn't the time for fashion talk. He looked scared. He told me to deny everything, and that I shouldn't worry. I told him there wasn't anything to deny, because I had no idea what was coming.
The officer -on -duty asked me to sit down, and I did. He said:
"Your name is Efstathios Patsantzis?"
I said yes.
"OK," he said."Sign here".
He gave me a paper with some personnal information, and a long winded text underneath them. I read through it. It was accusing the guy whose name was on top for several crimes. I guess I 'll have to go into some more detail here.
A few days before I was taken to the station, a group of New Democracy supporters, were putting up the poster I described above, on walls in the area of Exarhia. Then, a group of people with long hair and boots and some with scarfs over their faces came out of nowhere. They weren't happy, can you imagine that? They asked the ND supporters why they were putting up those posters who "depict one of our own?". That's how one of the eye witnesses put it. Then, obviously thinking the explenations presented weren't satisfying, they started beating on the group of the poster people with clubs and fists and other things, and one of them caught one of the ND guys by the collar, and threw him through the glass panel of a nearby store. The one performing the most painfull part of that showy stunt broke an arm. His company dispersed. 25 people described the assailant as a big, burly thuggy guy, tall, muscular and dark of hair and complexion. 25 of them, yes, all of them, had testified that this very person was the guy named in the paper I was holding. I mentally checked my image, and found it short, thin and blond, with a fair complexion.
Following this, was an account of the night when the policeman in the patrol car was assaulted with molotovs' and his partner had beaten the world record for cops running away from a riot. The policeman who had stayed in the car trying to contact the station was shown my picture, and he was testifying he knew me from Exarhia square were I was a regular (I wasn't, but he said I was), and that he had seen the face of the guy who burned him pretty well, but it wasn't me. His partner wanted to wrap it all up, and insisted it was me. Again, I was described as a big hairy guy with a dark complexion. Yes, I guess it was the same guy. Good for him. He didn't look a bit like me in the description of the running cop, but the same cop was absolutely positive it was me.
There were some more accusations thrown in the mix for good measure. My bullet belt was classified as "illegal explosive material", and I was charged for bearing it. The accusations for my organising the whole polytechnic school thing were there too, and if I hadn't been born after the original event in 1973, I can't see what could have stopped them for charging me with it too.
My hand, mind you, was in the cast all the time all of these were happening (no, not the original revolt of 1973). Of course the cops didn't know that. But I did.
It took me a while to take all that stuff in. Later, I was explained to that I was accused of violating five different articles of the penal code, all of them severe crimes invoking penalties of five to fifteen years of detention. I didn't know anything of that shit then, of course, indeed, I couldn't yet see what was actually happening. If I had listened carefully, I might have heard the soft crunchy noises of a piece of greased paper being wrapped around me, but I was still so wet behind the ears.
I spoke my thoughts on the matter.
"I didn't do this stuff."
"But it is you, we know it." The cop had an unshakable argument against me: "See there on the paper? It's your name on it. It's you who did all this".
A ha.
"No, no." I was quite calm while I was explaining. "It's not me. You got the wrong person. It's some other Efstathios Patsantzis. You got the wrong guy."
Apparently, they hadn't.
The cops I had met in the minors' department came to collect me. They put me in a car, and took me to the centrals, once again.
Well, it's always good to see a familiar face.
I spent that night, as well as every night of the following week waiting to see the examining magistrate (damn my dictionnary) who would officially call the charges and appoint a date for the court, on the 7th floor of the centrals' building, were the detention cells are. I don't want to go into detail for that week, not because it was traumatic or anything, although it was depressing, but it's going to blow this account to overwhelming proportions. Even for me, who am just writing them. Just. Whatever.
Next day I was taken to see the magistrate guy. He was bald and bespectacled, and looked like a wallruss with his mustache shaved and his tusks up his but. I bet he had haemorrages, judging by his expression, and the way he was sitting on his enormous arse. The first time I saw him, he didn't talk much. He grunted a lot though. My lawyers, both friends of my fathers', asked for a weeks' time to prepare me, and were grunted it, that's not a typo, and I was taken back to the centrals, in the happy company of junkies with withdrawal symptoms, and rat-faced ratfinks with a knack for telling you exactly how long you would stay in jail.
Touchy detail. There was a guy there, a green-grocer held for some money he owed to the IRS, and he happened to be named Stathis (derivative of Efstathios) just like me. We spent a night in the same cell, and I fell asleep on my only blanket. In the morning, I woke up tucked into a second one, the green-grocer guys own. He was sitting up on the concrete bench and seemed like he hadn't sleeped all night. I remembered to say something like thank you.
While I was there, my dad brought our neighbourhoods' barber who was a friend to put my head in a presentable shape. My mom brought me some clothes I hadn't worn since before I had started growing my hair, and I even shaved (a sin, in and of itself, not that I had much to shave anyway). When the impaled wallruss saw me again, his begoggled eyes lit up with a light shinning from withing the deeper depths of his reformers' of men soul. After finishing with what he had to ask me, and hearing what I had to say (a punk I knew had told me that each time they caught him he told them violence was against his ideology, and I did some deliberate use of that nice idea that day) he exclaimed:
"You brought me a criminal, and now I have before me a reformed human being!"
He was so proud of me.
The date for the court was set, and I went home.
What can I say about that day at court? It happened a year after the whole story, and until then, my life at the squat, and the building iself were long gone. The squat movement had already started to die out, by then. I was back at school, because I was advised it was the best thing to do, if I wanted to prove I was really "reformed" which would help my case a good deal. For my part, I was really depressed. Not that I was afraid of going to jail. I suspeced I was going to make much better friends and have generally better times in there than what I had at school. But the whole thing with the witnesses testimonies, that I couldn't get out of my head. They had identified me as a big, hairy brute. Twenty six of them, counting the burnt policemans' partner.
Was it possible...
Could it be that. At nights?
Maybe I ... shapeshifted, or something?
Was I a Werewolf?
Would I ever find out?
The day of the trial, I went to the court accompanied by a friend of mine, who had long dark hair. Not that he was much taller or burlier than me, mind you. However, when I saw my father and one of my lawyers talk with a lady who turned out to be one of the 25, she turned, pointed at my friend, and said "the kid who assaulted us, he's the one on the left, right?". Dad and lawyer nodded "no". My friend and I were staring in horror, but the lady wasn't feeling better either. She exclaimed "Holy Mother of God!!!!!" and I could hear each and every one of the exclamation marks, in her voice, and the capital initials too.
Later, I met the burnt policeman and his runner parnter. I shook the formers' hand, and the latters' too, but that was before I was told who they were. My father adviced me not to talk to the molotov victim, and I feel so lousy about having listened to him. I wanted to say "thank you" to the attacks' victim. He had said he knew me, and that I wasn't the one, effectively discharging me. That must have been a feat of morality, especially when all his partners were probably over his hospital bed pointing at my picture and screeching like harpies that "it's him, say it's him, we'll wrap him up". Of course, the truth is probably that he just wanted the guy who had really done it to get caught. His friend was still all smiles, though, and he didn't seem to have regretted his bullshit a single bit.
In court, the partner admitted he had exhibited a bit of excessive zeal. No shit. The DA was on my side, mind you, and he was the first to orate about the polices' enthusiasm at dealing with my case. I believe this was because he was a minors' DA, and, believe it or not, these guys, him and the other two members of the jury (the judge was a woman), looked like they really cared. But then, I had shown good will, cut my hair, put on nice clothes, gone back to school and left my previous squatting life. I felt miserable about it. The cop who had accused me mentioned our little chat at the station. He said that he had talked to me and found me a good boy, and that if he had talked to me before filling his report, he wouldn't have testified I was the one they were looking for.
Right.
Next, a couple of the witnesses from the ND people with the posters came in. The guy who had gone through the glass panel accused the police for having cheated him, denying vehemently that he had indeed recognised me when the police called him to the station to have a look at me. I realised then who were all these people coming in to peek at me that day. The DA asked him how it was that his signature had found its' way on the piece of paper testifying that he had recognised me, if he hadn't actually. The guy said the police had told him they knew I was the one they were looking for, and that he should sign so that they could wrap me up. He explained: "all those kids look the same, how am I supposed to know it wasn't him"?
Riiight.
The court didn't even bother with the other accusations, about the polytechnic school riots. I mark that down as a point in their favor. The DA had his oration to make, of course, and he went on yet more about "The Excessive Zeal of The Police" and how it "Astonishes Us, Today". He coulnd't leave it at that though. He had to go and quote some poetry from a poet, Napoleon Lapathiotis, renowned for his Christian Orthodox beliefs (also because he was a raving faggot, but they don't tell you that at school, or in a minors' court). The quote was from a poem about some luminous bewinged creatures that set out on a bright sunrise and came back with their wings broken and torn at dusk, and he explained how it was better that my wings were cut and torn while it was still early, otherwise I 'd fall really worse a fall later on in life and shit like that. I couldn't figure where all this was coming from, so I kept my mouth shut, but I bet he had heamorrages too, like that wallruss magistrate. Then the judge smirked and told me I was innocent, and let me go home.
Remember how all this started?
I was talking about Savvas Xeros, and how the police is identifying him as a member of 17N. Apparently, they have several eye-witnesses of some of the attacks of the group, which recognised him as one of the people who shot some of the groups' targets. Yes. Eye fucking witnesses indeed. The police also has a car, in their hands, from several years past, which the group left behind after one of those attacks. They report they found one of Xeros' fingers' print on it somewhere. It just so happens that I don't believe them, because that finger is one of the fingers Xeros lost during the explosion. The police themselves say they used the severed digit to compare its' prints to the ones they found in the car, and they only found one print in a whole fucking Toyota Corola. I know for sure they 're capable of taking the finger and pressing it on a door, or whatever part of the car to "smooth things out". Does it really matter? They have Xeros anyway. He had a bomb, and it blew in his face. He had keys, and a trademark revolver of 17N. Well, he didn't actually have them on him, but that's just details. I 'm not being sarcastic here. They could have very well found the bag with the gun, and the keys, in, I don't know, Paris, and report it clearly, and still they would charge him. They have him wrapped up. That's said and done.
What scares me, is not the cops. They 're doing their job, and being themselves, you can't blame them.
But, purportedly, they found one of the houses with the 17N arsenal thanks to a call from a concerned citizen, who recognised Xeros from his pictures distributed in the media. You get it? Someone recognised his neighboor, and called the police to inform them it was the terrorist. The police says its' phone lines given to the public to help the investigation are overloaded. People are helping them out.
They are collaborating with the police.
Last time I checked, people in Greece, weren't cattle, like in the US. I gave them that. They didn't buy everything that was served to them for a fact, from the government, or from anyone. Some time ago, people didn't mind 17N either. It killed some persons who looked like genuine enemies of the people (american diplomats, bussinessmen, a ND -a right wing party, mind you- parliament member, etc), but they allways took great care to not harm innocents (once they messed it up and one person died). They were also doing a great job ridiculing the police. One of their most famous hits, was the one were they attacked a police station, locked the cops in a cell and took weapons and uniforms from the station. They scored really high on the coolometer that day. They had the balls to do stuff like that for 27 years, in a place which is growing all the more placid, and sedate, like most European countries, where even being young doesn't mean being awake, anymore, only having increased potential for productiveness. They had sent this picture to the papers, a photograph of all the rockets and bazookas, and bullets, and grenades, and handguns they had stolen from cops and the army over the years, under their flag, a red rectangle with a yellow star in the center, marked 17N. Under the flag, over the weapons, they had a picture of Che, one of Marx, and I think either Trotchky, or a local left wing guerilla leader, Velouhiotis, I 'm not certain which one. They would hit, and then sent pamflets to the papers, explaining why, and they always called the policemen "cops" in them. They adviced the newest generations of terrorist groups on how to make bombs and plan an attack, through these very pamflets, until a law was passed to forbid the publishing of such texts from terrorists. They 've gotten into several forays with the police in the streets, over the years, and they always escaped, and made the cops look like Elmer Fad. They had style. When they hit, they spoke like heroes of Charles' Bukowskis', cursing the cops like street punks, and talking to the civilians that happened on the scene calmly, in a noble scum style, like Arsene fucking Lupin.
They were probably corrupted, infiltrated by some secret service or other, but that's the fate of romantics, the world over, and all through history. To be exploited. What the fuck, they fought against that very thing, they did.
And romantics, they were. Are?
They had magic, these guys. It went boom, and it killed people, and it just went boom in their face, but that's what magic tends to do.
They were Zoro.
I believed in them, damn it.
They made me feel safe.
If they really fucked up, and are being dealt with as I 'm writing this, like the news say, who the hell am I supposed to look up to? Who should I believe in? The people who flooded the police with eager information about their next door neighbours? Like germans did in the nazis' times? The same ones who feel safer now the threat of terrorism is over and no one with the balls to kick the system in the groin and fight from without is left?
Why don't I better shoot my self in the head, eh?
Shit, man.
I don't feel safe any more.